The Los Angeles Times predicts that after healthcare, Afghanistan, and financial regulatory reform, global warming will be the next partisan divide in the US. Anyone who tries to read some of the thousands of impassioned blog posts on this topic would say that it has already happened.

-- Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., had earlier announced an investigation into the e-mails. (See below.) Now, "The U.S. Senate's leading global warming skeptic has sent letters to several climate change scientists and to the inspectors general of various federal agencies notifying them to retain breached documents and e-mails that he says prove researchers are manipulating data to make the case for global warming," says FOX News.

Carol Browner, the president’s senior adviser for energy and climate change, said the president hoped that the announcement of the American target would spur other countries to show their cards.

“Obviously we hope other major economies will put forth ambitious action plans of their own,” she said at a White House briefing Wednesday morning

– In an article titled "Global warming accelerates; Climategate rumbles on," Reuters notes that "skeptics are "using a flood of leaked e-mails from a British University — dubbed 'Climategate' – to question the findings" of the Copenhagen Diagnosis. (For more details, see "Amid charges of global warming hoax, new warning on climate change.")

– Sen. Inhofe announced that he would probe whether the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."

– In Britain, former chancellor Lord Lawson, a global warming skeptic, called for an inquiry into data "manipulation" about global warming, as a result of the e-mails. (See here for an interview with Lawson.)

– Security experts say the hack could lead to future attacks, reports ChannelWeb, which adds that there could be "... more malicious attacks down the road, as hackers use cybercrime to further political agenda." Also, the individuals whose e-mails were exposed now have some of their private information in the public domain and could be subject to phishing or worse.

– The University of East Anglia. which had been criticized for its tepid response to the extensive e-mail theft, announced that plans to launch a review of the incident.